1. Field
The present disclosure herein relates to semiconductor devices and methods of manufacturing the same and, more particularly, to semiconductor devices having improved integration density and methods of manufacturing the same.
2. Description of the Related Art
In general, semiconductor devices may be typically categorized as either volatile memory devices or nonvolatile memory devices. The volatile memory devices lose their stored data when their power supplies are interrupted. For example, the volatile memory devices may include dynamic random access memory (DRAM) devices and static random access memory (SRAM) devices. In contrast, the nonvolatile memory devices retain their stored data even when their power supplies are interrupted. The nonvolatile memory devices may include programmable read only memory (PROM) devices, erasable programmable read only memory (EPROM) devices, electrically erasable programmable read only memory (EEPROM) devices, flash memory devices and etc.
Highly integrated semiconductor devices have been increasingly demanded with development of the electronic industry. However, in the event that the semiconductor devices become highly integrated using general scaling down rules, various problems may occur. For example, as a minimum feature size (e.g., a minimum line width) of the semiconductor device is reduced to several tens of nanometers, a process margin in fabrication of the semiconductor devices has been gradually decreased. Further, it may be more difficult to optimize characteristics of various discrete elements in the semiconductor device (e.g., diverse driving circuits and/or memory cells in the semiconductor device) when the minimum feature size of the semiconductor device is continuously reduced.